Two important things to note about Prince. First, the singer will turn 55 (yeah, you read that right) on June 7. Second: he’s at the center of a fairly recent dispute over what exactly constitutes copyright infringement in the digital age.

Here’s what happened. Last month, the singer’s record label issued a takedown notice to Twitter to remove eight Vine posts featuring footage from a recent concert. Vine, of course, is the rapidly-growing video-sharing app that’s currently available to anyone with an iPhone. The videos were eventually removed from the site, but that’s not the point. But a key question emanating from the case is this: Can you infringe on someone in six seconds? In Prince’s case, the answer is obviously yes.

Right now, we’re enjoying a rich new age of images — everything from Vine videos to BuzzFeed cat GIFs that are shared, recast and then shared again. If lawyers began to throw copyright grenades into this mix, these splendid strains of creativity could be quickly snuffed out.

Back in 2011, CNN reported on the culture clash between Oklahoma’s white residents and its fast-growing Latino population. Like many parts of the country, Oklahoma’s population is growing a lot browner. The number of Latinos in the state has doubled over the past decade, from 179,000 to more than 332,000.

That cultural shift hasn’t been easy. State lawmakers have passed some of the country’s harshest immigration legislation. Senator Ralph Shortey (R-Ok.) summed up some up the backlash, telling CNN that Latinos “are not assimilating and enriching the culture of Oklahoma. They are invading the culture…Oklahoma is not the melting pot…(Latinos are) not doing their culture any favors when it’s shoved into Oklahomans’ faces.”

It’s within that context that NPR’s Code Switch blog looked at how some undocumented Latino residents are fairing in the aftermath of last week’s devestating tornado, which struck just outside of Oklahoma City. Citizenship has become a key factor in people’s decisions about whether or not to seek help in recovery, and even the storm itself has unveiled some of the barriers faced by the country’s millions of undocumented immigrants.

From Code Switch:

“It’s stressful,” Amelia says in Spanish.

Amelia cleans offices to support her and her 8-year-old daughter. They lived in a trailer home in Moore that was in the path of last week’s tornado. When the storm came through town, Amelia rushed to pick her daughter up from Plaza Towers Elementary School. They then took cover under a bridge. Amelia says it’s a miracle they survived, but they still lost nearly everything.

“I was desperate,” Amelia says, “But also afraid to ask for help.”

But she knew she had no choice but to take the risk. It took her three days to build up her courage. Then she got in her car, talked to church volunteers and went to a public health clinic for counseling. She even approached an official and asked how the government could help rebuild her life. She says she can’t imagine having done any of this before the tornado.

Native Brooklyn rapper Yassin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, released a video last week that speaks out against the New York City Police Department’s controversial Stop-and-Frisk policy. The song, called “Don’t Tread On Me” is a public service announcement released in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group that took the NYPD to federal court over the practice.

A federal judge in Arizona ruled on Friday that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies engage regularly in unconstitutional racial profiling against Latinos. The judge ordered the department to immediately stop targeting Latinos based on their race.

The suit is a victory for civil rights groups and for Phoenix Latinos in general whose lives have been marred by Arpaio’s local immigration enforcement activities. The ruling is in response to a class action suit brought by the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund on behalf of Latino drivers who say they’re stopped, interrogated and detained because of their race.

[I]n determining whom it will detain and/or investigate… the MCSO continues to take into account a suspect’s Latino identity as one factor in evaluating those persons whom it encounters.

[snip]

Thus, to the extent it uses race as a factor in arriving at reasonable suspicion or forming probable cause to stop or investigate persons of Latino ancestry for being in the country without authorization, it violates the Fourth Amendment. In addition, it violates the Plaintiff class’s right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The decision prohibits Arpaio’s department from using race as a factor in determining if a driver is an undocumented immigrants. It bars Arpaio from reporting suspects to ICE without suspicion that drivers and passengers are in violation of other state laws.

Judge Snow’s ruling is also a subtle indictment of the federal government’s own immigration enforcement programs. During the period at issue in the suit, federal officials authorized the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office to to inquire about immigration status and detain undocumented immigrants though the 287(g) program. The Department of Homeland Security later terminated the 287(g) contact with the county, in large part because of Arpaio’s illegal implementation, but Judge Snow notes that it was under that local-federal partnership that Arpaio was formally empowered to profile Latinos. He writes:

In the 287(g) training that ICE provided, and in other policies and procedures promulgated by the MCSO, MCSO deputies were instructed that they could consider race or “Mexican ancestry” as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions during immigration enforcement operations without violating the legal requirements pertaining to racial bias in policing.

The decision came days before the Tuesday deadline for Phoenix advocates to submit signatures for a sheriff recall election. As of yesterday, groups organizing for the recall still needed to collect about 90,000 signatures to compel a new election, the Phoenix New Times reports. Now the advocates hope the court decision will push Arpaio to resign instead.

“We’re really pushing now for Arpaio to resign,” Respect Arizona campaign manager Lilia Alvarez told the New Times. “After this ruling, we should not have to spend the taxpayer dollars to have a recall special election.”

Resignation would be out character for the recalcitrant sheriff. His office has said it will appeal the decision, and continues to deny it ever relied on race in it’s policing activities.

When Democrats and Republicans unanimously accepted Sen. David Vitter’s amendment (#1056) that would ban violent felons from receiving food stamps during a Senate debate earlier this week, that proposal may have been launched from poor facts.

In Sen. Vitter’s press release about the amendment, he exclusively cites a report from Louisiana’s legislative auditor’s report to justify his amendment. For Vitter’s focus on those convicted of violent felonies, you’d think there was some information about the abundance of felons using food stamps. Quite the contrary, there’s not a single word in the report about violent felons.

Vitter’s press release doesn’t mention anything from the report on felons abusing food stamps either. He does point to other fraud the auditor found:

The audit covered the fiscal years from 2010 to 2012 and found that there were duplicate and overpayments of millions. The results show that more than $1.1 million was issued to 1,761 people who were in prison, 322 people gained benefits even though their wages exceeded $50,000, and 3,060 people used $2 million worth of benefits in a state other than Louisiana.

Few things here: One, that same report noted that 1,157 cases that resulted in $841,615 in overpayments happened because of state agency errors — mistakes “such as a caseworker entering incorrect income amounts or failing to remove an ineligible member from the case.”

That may seem like a big deal, but consider those are totals for 2010 and 2011. Total SNAP benefits in those years totaled $2.5 billion in Louisiana. $840,000 in overpayments from $2.5 billion is rather minute. What this has to do with former incarcerated citizens with violent felonies is unclear.

Not to mention, Louisiana has one of the lowest overpayment rates in the nation — of all the states last year they ranked fourth in low overpayment error rates, and had the second highest improvement among all the states.

This improvement happened while the state’s administrative burdens increased. From 2008 to 2012 the workload for SNAP administrative increased 76 percent — 259,770 cases to 380,011 cases — mostly because of the economic recession. Meanwhile, staffing at the state’s SNAP offices decreased from 1,315 to 1,090 caseworkers.

But the number of erroneous cases alone might explain some of the questionable findings in the auditor’s report, such as prison inmates using food stamps (How exactly does that work?).

As for the 3,060 who spent $2 billion in SNAP benefits in other states, Vitter fails to mention that this is legal. SNAP beneficiaries receive their food allocations by their resident state, but those can be used anywhere in the United States. That this might indicate fraud is purely speculative.

Fraud isn’t a major problem in the SNAP program at large. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the national program achieved its lowest overpayment error rate on record in 2011. “The overwhelming majority [of errors] result from honest mistakes by recipients, eligibility workers, data entry clerks, or computer programmers,” writes CBPP senior policy analyst Dottie Rosenbaum.

Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter took to the floor this week to introduce an amendment that would gut the federal government’s Lifeline Wireless program as part of an amendment to the farm bill. The program, which others on the Right have said gives out free “Obamaphones”, offers subsidized cell phones to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

Vitter has become one of the loudest opponents of the program, which I’ve written before is a case study in how the right uses race to pervert the spending debate. Vitter used a bunch of racially coded language to express his outrage with the program. “I think the whole program is an entitlement mentality gone wild,” he says. “We have started the notion that folks are entitled to the government providing them with almost everything under the sun.”

It’s worth taking another look at the fact vs. fiction when it comes to these so-called “Obamaphones.” Check them out after the jump.

An after-school program set up by the North Community YMCA in Minneapolis gives young kids the opportunity and equipment needed to make rap music as a reward for keeping up with their schoolwork. Founder of the program called Beats And Rhymes say their mission is to “provide challenging, positive youth and career development opportunities for low income, culturally-diverse youth.”

The young students have rapped and rhymed about fun subjects like Cheetos and Khaki pants but they also get political in other songs with messages about bullying, violence and drugs.

On Thursday, Defense attorneys on the George Zimmerman case released evidence they discovered on Trayvon Martin’s cell phone, including text messages in which he wrote about taking part in an organized fight, smoking marijuana and being suspended from school. They intend to use the reputation-damaging evidence about Trayvon to paint a different picture of him than the one that’s been shared by his family and supporters.

The evidence packet contains more than two dozen photos, including one that shows Trayvon with gold teeth and two of him making an obscene gesture. Those have been widely circulated online since shortly after the shooting, and it’s not clear where defense attorneys found them, but as of Thursday, they officially became part of Zimmerman’s criminal case.

The text messages that Trayvon wrote about fighting may be the most damaging to the state.

U.S. Department of Justice investigators found a number of unconstitutional practices at the Escambia County Jail facility in northwest Florida that “constitute serious risks to prisoner safety,” according to the Justice Department’s findings letter. Among those problems were insufficient access to mental healthcare for the inmates, and racial segregation of black prisoners. Said the U.S. Department of Justice in a release:

Specifically, the department concluded that known systemic deficiencies at the facility, stemming mainly from staffing shortages, continue to subject prisoners to excessive risk of assault by other prisoners and to inadequate mental health care. Additionally, the department found that until recently, the jail had an informal policy and practice of designating some of its housing units as only for African-American prisoners. By segregating some of its prisoners on the basis of race, the jail not only stigmatized and discriminated against many of its African-American prisoners, it also fanned combustible racial tensions within the jail.

The racial segregation of black inmates into “black-only pods” had been occurring for decades. Justice officials first discovered the practice in October last year during a tour. They warned Escambia County Jail officials then that this was a breach of 14th Amendment equal protection rights. According to the findings letter, “For decades, the Jail’s officials have assumed that segregating on the basis of race would lead to a safer facility.”

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Roy Austin, Jr., who wrote the findings letter, said such assumptions were “unproven and untethered to data” and “insufficient to justify an explicit racial classification.”

Escambia County’s population is 23.1 percent African-American, and 70 percent white. The county jail has 1,442 prisoners, 65 percent of whom are black and 35 percent white.

A new sheriff for Escambia, David Morgan, told the Justice Department this past April that the segregation had stopped but Austin wrote that the Justice Department “will want to ensure that any agreement we reach with the Jail completely and permanently eliminates racially segregated housing units.” Their investigation concluded that “the practice of segregating on the basis of race has compromised security by exacerbating racial tensions within the Facility.”

Escambia County is 23.1 percent African-American, and 70 percent white.

Other Justice Department findings:

Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are a common occurrence, owed to a shortage of correctional staff, resulting in serious harm to prisoners

The jail does not provide timely and adequate access to appropriately skilled mental health care professionals

The jail routinely fails to provide appropriate medications to prisoners with mental illness

The jail provides inadequate housing and observation for prisoners with serious mental illness who are at risk for self injury or suicide

Austin wrote that these are all violations of the 14th amendment and the 8th amendment, which protects those convicted of criminal offenses.

Jennifer Lopez is embarking on an ambitious new business venture. The entertainer, who has long reigned as one of the most popular Latinas in show business, has teamed up with Verizon Wireless to launch a new mobile brand aimed specifically at the country’s fast-growing Latino population. The venture, Viva Movil, has already begun to sell smartphones, tablets, and Verizon Wireless plans on its website.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lopez revealed that while the products have already been selling online, she plans to open more than a dozen Viva Movil stores in cities with large Latino populations, including Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. The first stores are set to open on June 15.

But what, exactly, does it mean for a store to “cater” to Latinos? According to Lopez, it boils down to accessibility. Employees will speak both English and Spanish and stores will be equipped with play areas for children since “Latinos often like to shop together as a family,” she says.

“It was a no-brainer to finally cater to an overlooked segment of the population that has emerged, to actually do something that caters specifically to them,” Lopez told the Times.

Lopez’s foray into the tech industry underscores the tremendous buying power of Latino smartphone users in the United States. It’s a consumer base that Verizon has long been in the business of courting; in 2010, the company launched an ambitious advertising campaign featuring a diverse group of young, savvy cell phone users who were determined to “Rule the Air.” Advocates criticized the company for blatantly courting users of color while also fighting against regulatory efforts to protect Internet access for vulnerable, low-income users.

Nonetheless, the company is moving forward. And for good reason. From the Times:

Lopez cited “staggering” demographic statistics that showed the Latino population had grown 43% in the last five years, compared with 5% growth for non-Latinos. Latinos currently make up more than 16% of the U.S. population, and that figure is expected to grow to 30% by 2050.

The devices and plans sold by Viva Movil are the same as Verizon’s, although Verizon doesn’t own a stake in the new company. Customers can purchase smartphones including the iPhone 5, Galaxy S 3 and the BlackBerry Z10 and sign up for Verizon’s 4G LTE network service.

In announcing the partnership, Verizon noted that Latinos are an especially important customer base for the industry and represented $1.2 trillion in buying power last year. The country’s No. 1 wireless carrier cited a recent Nielsen report that showed that 75% of Latinos in the U.S. own smartphones, higher than the overall percentage of Americans who own smartphones, at 63%.

It’s a smart business move, but will have profound implications on the industry. Research has shown that while everyone is jumping on the smartphone bandwagon, black and Latino users are more likely to depend on their phones for basic access, and Verizon is among the country’s most expensive Internet service providers.

Three Harvard grad students experimented with whether there was ethnic prejudice in local election administration by emailing every local or county election official, commission and supervisor in 48 states with Latino-sounding and non-Latino-sounding names and examined the responses. What they found were that local election officials were three-and-a-half to four-times more likely to respond to the emails that came from the non-Latino name, Greg Walsh, than the Latino name, Luis Rodriguez.

The gap in those responses grew three points wider when their emails contained questions about voter ID.

The students were able to find qualitative bias as well, meaning even when election officials responded to the Latino name, the information included was less accurate or informative than the information given to “Greg Walsh.”

“Our results indicate that changes to existing voting regulations are likely to differentially increase information costs for Latino voters because public officials are less responsive to their inquiries than to non-Latinos,” wrote the study’s authors.

The Washington Post asked True the Vote president Catherine Engelbrecht about the study. She didn’t pass it to her Latino counterpart Voto Honesto — which appears to no longer exist — but rather the Texan of German background took it upon herself to dismiss the findings, calling it “a conclusion in desperate search of a viable methodology.”

This is a clumsy flip of the common rejoinder against her own advocacy for voter ID laws, which voting rights advocates call “a solution in search of a problem.”

Says Aura Bogado, our Voting Rights Watch reporter from last year, and current blogger for The Nation: “The study is especially worrisome when one considers that elections officials still do not view Latinos—who makes up the nation’s fastest growing population—as a legitimate voting base.”

An attorney for George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch leader charged with fatally shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, is pressing a Florida judge to allow autopsy blood results be presented to jurors because they show the teenager tested positive for marijuana use.

Defense attorney Don West argued in his written response filed Tuesday that the marijuana use is relevant because Zimmerman told a police dispatcher shortly before shooting Trayvon that he believed the Miami Gardens teenager was suspicious and may have been on drugs.

Yesterday, Sen. Vitter of Louisiana offered up an amendment to permanently drop anyone ever convicted of a violent crime from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). According to Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Democrats in the Senate obliged him. The amendment is for a farm bill, which is currently being debated in the Senate.

The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since. In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.

So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut. … Democrats accepted it without trying to modify it to address its most ill-considered aspects.

Two-thirds of SNAP recipients are children, elderly or the disabled, and two-fifths of SNAP households live below half the poverty line.

According to Greenstein, if this amendment ends up in the farm bill and passes, it would hit African Americans particularly hard:

Given incarceration patterns in the United States, the amendment would have a skewed racial impact. Poor elderly African Americans convicted of a single crime decades ago by segregated Southern juries would be among those hit.

Sen. Vitter is claiming that his amendment is only aimed at preventing those convicted of violent crimes from obtaining benefits, apparently under the logic that stripping them of what may be their only form of income assistance will lead to less violence. Curiously, he didn’t propose that johns who’ve hired sex workers would also be banned from SNAP.

Sen. Vitter also proposed an end to the so-called “Obama Phone” program, which started under President Ronald Reagan to help elderly and low-income with cellphone service, particularly in rural areas.

When IRS officials publicly apologized last week for sorting out tax-exemption applications from tea party groups, one tea party network seized the moment to claim victimization by the federal government. True the Vote, a conglomerate of conservative tea party and “Patriot” groups across the nation seeking restrictive voting laws, claimed that their application for 501(c)3 status was wrongfully put through rigorous review by the IRS. Now they are suing the IRS claiming that due to their “perceived conservative policy positions and affiliation with Tea Party organizations” they were “systematically targeted… for additional review and scrutiny … [and] was deliberately subjected to numerous unnecessary and burdensome requests for information about its operations and affiliations,” as it reads in their complaint.

For the record, the IRS officials have said that political bias was not a motivation for their sorting of applications. The inspector general who investigated the situation found no political bias, only that IRS officials in a Cincinnati office used “inappropriate criteria” for the sorting. So far as we know, the IRS employees sorted this way because of a spike in 501(c) 4 tax exemption status applications — the bulk of those from tea party and patriot groups. Meanwhile, a decrease in IRS staff and resources burdened their capacity to effectively deal with the application deluge.

But despite True the Vote’s claim, nothing that IRS officials are accused of or have admitted to would support True the Vote’s accusation. The criteria used to sort out applications was to find any application that had the words “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12” [a reference to conservative groups started by Glenn Beck] in the applicant’s name. One reason for this might be that many of these groups have flouted tax laws while some have called publicly for the elimination of taxes and the IRS altogether. Either way, True the Vote has none of those keywords in their name, so they can’t claim they were part of the sorted group.

They do have “Vote” in their name, though, and if they did receive extra scrutiny, it could be because 501(c)3 groups are not supposed to engage in activity that influences how people vote when it comes to political candidates and campaigns. And yet, True the Vote intervened in the recall election for Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin last year, and they are currently leading an intervention in Rep. Allen West’s already failed re-election run as we speak. In that sense, True the Vote wasn’t profiled by the IRS, they profiled themselves.

True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht said in a press release: “After answering hundreds of questions and producing thousands of documents, we’re done waiting. The IRS does not have the power to pocket veto our application.”

The IRS does have the authority to request for additional information from an organization seeking non-profit status if that group’s activities have engaged in questionable political activity. As Kim Barker and Justin Elliott reported at ProPublica:

In the 1970s, that meant flagging all applications for primary and secondary schools in the south facing desegregation. In the 1980s, during the wave of consolidation in the health-care industry, all applications from health-care nonprofits needed to be sent to headquarters. The division’s different field offices had to send these applications up the chain.

The fact that True the Vote’s membership largely consists of tea party members only adds to their dubious reputation. But True the Vote has been down the litigious road before — a few times actually. Last year, they basically created a cottage industry out of shaking down states with nuisance lawsuits around election practices, while pressuring those states to put restrictive voting polices in place. Looks like the IRS is just the latest caught in their scheme.

Give it up for young African-American women. While youth voter turnout in the 2012 election was down overall, it was young female voters, and young black female voters at that, who led the youth turnout in the 2012 elections.

According to a new analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, young black women posted the highest voter turnout of all young voters in 2012. In fact, young black women voted at a higher rate than any gender, racial or ethnic subset of voters between the age of 18 and 29. At 60.1 percent voter turnout, young black women out-voted the next highest group, young white women, by 11 percentage points. Women vote in larger numbers than men no matter the metric, be it by marital or employment status or educational attainment.

None of this changes the fact that voter turnout among young whites, blacks and Latinos declined between 2008 and 2012, however. But in keeping with the historic turnout among black voters broadly in 2012, these youth vote numbers add another layer to the conversation. Check out just the youth voter turnout for female voters, broken down by race:

The Obama Administration has deported some 1.5 million people since taking office and as Colorlines.com revealed last year, more than one in five are parents of U.S. citizens. Many more have other relatives here. As the comprehensive immigration reform bill moves from committee to the Senate floor, many immigrants and immigration reform advocates will be watching a provision that would permit some deportees to return to the United States if they left behind U.S. citizen spouses, children or parents. Now, a set of new reports and investigations reveal what’s at stake as members of Congress consider what some advocates are calling the “right to return” provision: without a legal route to come back, many are travelling back over the border to reunite with their family, and thousands are ending up dead in the desert or locked up in federal prison.

A Prince William County, Virginia father is speaking out after a Walmart security guard allegedly called police to report a possible kidnapping because the man’s three young daughters appeared to be of a different race.

The father, who only identified himself as Joseph, is white and his wife of ten years is black and according to a Walmart manager that meant their children “didn’t fit.”

On Thursday evening, Joseph took all three girls to the Walmart in Potomac Mills in Woodbridge to cash a check. He says they weren’t there long, but spent a few extra minutes in the parking lot while he buckled the girls in and then made a phone call.

Joseph says he then went to up his wife, Keana, and as they were arriving home, they were shocked to find a Prince William County police officer waiting for them.

“He asks us very sincerely, ‘Hey, I was sent here by Walmart security. I just need to make sure that the children that you have are your own,’” Joseph says.

The Senate Judiciary Committee last night passed a massive immigration reform bill and sent it to the Senate floor. The audience in the panel room began to chant “sí se puede.” Most observers expected the markup of the bill to last to the end of this week, but the Senators spent long days Monday and Tuesday as well as last week to consider 200 amendments. In the end, the legislation passed the committee with significant bi-partisan support in a 13-5 vote. Though it remained similar to the original bill introduced last month by the Gang of Eight, many of the approved amendments, and some that were rejected, will significantly impact immigrants and their families.

In a dramatic ending to the markup of the bill, the committee completed the legislation without the the inclusion of immigration rights for bi-national same-sex partners. The amendment had promised to pull thousands more into reform. A 2011 report from the UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated that there are 40,000 gay and lesbian couples barred from applying for immigration benefits for noncitizen partners that are available to married opposite sex couples.

In principle, the amendment to allow gay and lesbian U.S. citizens to sponsor their non-citizen partners for green cards had broad support from Democrats. But as it came under attack from Republicans, some Democrats indicated they would not back the provision if it would repel Republicans.

Republicans, including South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, who was a member of the Gang of Eight Senators that drafted the bill, said the amendment would derail the legislation.

“You’ve got me on immigration. You don’t have me on marriage,” Graham said. “If you want to keep me on immigration, let’s stay on immigration.”

Ultimately, committee Chair Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., withdrew the amendment. “I take the Republican sponsors of this important legislation at their word that they will abandon their own efforts if discrimination is removed from our immigration system,” Leahy said.

The other major sticking point yesterday was debate over visas for science and technology workers. Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, who has been walking the fence on the bill, and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York offered a compromise amendment to simplify the H1-B visa program for so-called STEM visas in ways that tech companies like Microsoft and Facebook support.

Tech companies say there are not enough U.S. workers to fill jobs. But labor groups, including the AFL-CIO call the amendment “anti-worker.” It’s not yet clear what impact the compromise will have on the already fragile relationship between labor and business groups. But Democrats apparently decided the risk of alienating part of their labor support was worth it to gain support from Hatch, who could prove a bellwether for other conservatives in the Senate.

The Senators considered dozens of other amendments yesterday. They passed one from Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, that could make it more difficult for the Secretary of Homeland Security to grant return permits to deportees with U.S. citizen family members. The panel rejected an amendment from Hawaii Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono that would have allowed U.S. citizens to petition for their siblings and adult children if the petitioner could prove they face significant hardship without their relative.

On Monday, the Senators passed a set of amendments aimed at protecting detainees, including one limiting the use of solitary confinement and another providing significant new protections for detained parents.

The bill will move now to the Senate where reform proponents hope it will take no more than a month to pass. Immigration reforms greatest challenge reamins in the House, where a group of lawmakers are currently finishing their own immigration bill.

Nine-year-old Asean Johnson may need to stand up on a chair to be seen above the podium from which he speaks, but he holds in him a wisdom and fire well beyond his years. Watch him address the crowds that assembled Monday to protest Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school closures agenda, which will affect Garvey Elementary School, where Johnson is a student, and a proposed 53 other schools in the district.

“Kids need safety. Rahm Emanuel is not caring about our schools. He’s not caring about our safety,” Johnson said at the rally. “He should be invested in these schols, not closing them. He should be supporting these schools, not closing him.”

Alas, despite months of protest, including multiple acts of civil disobedience and Johnson’s own passionate pleas, the Chicago Tribune reports that perhaps just five of the projected 54 schools may be saved.